Food Pantry and Crisis Support Services History & Goals

Food Pantry: Urban Ministries operates the second largest food pantry in Wake County. Our pantry provides a weeks’ worth of groceries for families in need and distributes more than 400,000 meals a year. Food insecurity is one of the biggest concerns for those facing poverty, especially during the summer months when children are home from school. Goals include:

Provide 230 tons of food, including fresh produce, to 8,000 households – including 9,000 children – sufficient to feed each family for one week.

Harvest 2,000 lbs. of fresh vegetables from our community gardens.

Improve quality of donated food through by encouraging volunteers to read labels for low sodium, fat content, no sugar added to products, etc. In this way we hope to educate donors too, benefitting their families as well!

Use our refrigerators and freezers to “shelve” fresh or frozen vegetables instead of canned.

Coordinate the efforts of 1,500 volunteers, who learn in orientation the importance of donating nutritious food which, in turn, helps inform the food choices they make for themselves.

Prescription Medications: With funding from the Filling in Gaps (FIGs) program, Urban Ministries is able to help more than 500 people each year obtain prescription medications that are beyond their financial reach. Urban Ministries also has one of the only free on-site pharmacies in our county to provide prescription assistance to at no charge to clients of the Open Door Clinic.

How You Can Help

Your generous cash donations are used to support all of our crisis support services, keeping essential programs running.

Archives

Meta

Angeline’s Story

Angeline came to Urban Ministries of Wake County in need of food assistance for her family. She is the working mother of five school-aged children, ranging from high school to preschool, and her husband is disabled. “We struggle to make ends meet,” she says, and having her five children home this summer “has put an extra strain on the household,” as her children were receiving subsidized meals at school.

The family was given a week’s-worth of healthy groceries. “I am so thankful and relieved to receive food for our family at this time. Urban Ministries really came through for us when we had nowhere else to go.”
- Angeline, working mother of five